Chapter 2 is Life Balance – How to be Faithful with Everything Entrusted to Me. Sounds pretty daunting. I went over a list of daily tasks I put together with my mentor last night. His first reaction was “You need to pick the top five and focus on them”. I then tried to explain that I had eliminated everything that I did not want to do every day, and these were the things that I wanted to do each and every day. I did admit that some would be impossible due to circumstances, but that I made the list so that I could keep myself from slacking off. I made the list, so the only one I impact by not doing them is me. To him the list was daunting. To me it was a good start to the day.
Beyond the everything, the title of the chapter is about how to make sure you keep all the balls you are juggling up in the air. The main thought I had before reading was to eliminate as much as possible and then prioritize what is left. Simple to think, hard to do, but possible. However, the rest of the title makes it that much more interesting. It is not about what we choose, but what God entrusts us with and how faithful we are to Him in those things.
The first highlight was Jesus and the pressures of life. Jesus is our example of understanding what God puts before us and focusing only on those things. Jesus did not get married, He did not have kids, and He was not saddled with running a business or being part of the government or even of the church.
The next highlights were What are priorities? (exactly), How many priorities can one man juggle? (one?), and What are the priorities of a Christian man? The great thing is that the author gives us a list. What a great idea. The list: Loving God, Loving People, Vocation, Money, and Ministry. I would have expected more and I would have expected vocation and work to be one. The even better part is that he gave us a list of how to love God, how to love people, and what he meant by vocation (hint it involves vacations).
From a process standpoint, the author asks that we do a personal assessment of our faithfulness in these five areas and see how we stack up against the goal. Interestingly, the next step the author has for us is to ask ourselves what we want, what do we really want. If we do not want it, we are not going to change our lives to achieve it. It will be a list that we made and that lies in a book we never open. I have “been there, done that”.
The next step is to squeeze out enough time for each of our priorities. I do not like this as my concept is to push everything off the table and put the big things in. But what he really means is that our priorities are people, and we need to choose which people are a priority and put them into the schedule. He has three categories based on emergency medical trauma decision making. We need to “squeeze” in the people we cannot live without and the people who could not live without us. The second group is those who you would help if it does not detract from the people in the first list. The last is everyone else: those you can do without. I once had a friend who is now not part of my life. He decided I was in the last bucket for him. I didn’t like it, but I realized I did not need him either and I am no longer worried about it.
The last steps in this chapter are basically get the right things done based on the list, make a plan you can follow, and then do it. The biggest take away for me was that I have to want it. I have to want what God wants. I have to sacrifice what I want for what He wants. Otherwise, I will not be the Christian Man I am called to be: the Good and Faithful Servant.